Luis Suárez was the middle one of seven brothers growing up in Salto, almost 500 kilometres north of Montevideo in Uruguay, and when he was seven his family moved to the capital. He did not want to go (so much so that he stayed with his grandmother for a month when everybody left because they were unable to persuade him to join them).

But his family had no choice. There was not much work in their city and his father was employed in El Trigal biscuit factory in Montevideo. So it was that when his mother got a cleaning job in Tres Cruces, the central bus terminal of the city, it was clear that the whole family would have to move. Luis did not want to hear about it, but in the end he accepted it. He spent the whole year in Montevideo and as soon as school was out he went to spend the summer in Salto again because he missed it so much. "The change of city, the way of talking – because they talk differently there and of course they make fun of you," he tells me.

He missed the quietness, the security, being able to leave the front door open while they were sleeping and, above all, spending the day playing barefoot on the grass. "We came to a city where it was practically impossible to play barefoot on the grass. Of course I was going to miss it. But we had to get used to all of that as best we could."

And so they did. He began to go to School No171 in the neighbourhood of Tres Cruces and to kids' football with Urreta [a boys' team] and then with Nacional of the AUFI [the national children's football association]. He made new friends … "Martín, Leonardo and Víctor. I practically lived at their home, because their parents loved me like a son and we treated each other like brothers." And it was with them and their parents that he used to go the games and to train.

But then, just as everything was settling down again, Luis's parents separated and it was a hard blow for him. He was nine and he felt it deeply. In the space of two years his surroundings, his routine, his friends, his school and his family as he knew them had all changed. And, perhaps because of that, he rebelled against the reality that came crashing around him without offering him a choice in the matter.

"They were tough times. My parents had split up and there was all the problem of us being a family that never had the possibility of choosing anything. I was never able to tell my mother or father, 'I want these trainers', and have them buy me those trainers. It was the pure reality."

Between 12 and 14 it looked unlikely that Suárez would ever play professional football, let alone play for Uruguay in the World Cup Photograph: Reuters

And perhaps it was through his rebellion that at the age of 12 he discovered his freedom to say no. No to the new city. No to a new life. No to the fact that his parents' marriage was on the rocks. No to the new routines, the grass that you can't play barefoot on, to the fact that you had to live behind closed doors. And he said no to his studies and to football too, because that was his way of rebelling.

"Up to the age of 12 I knew that I wanted to play football, but afterwards, from 12 to 14, I went through a phase in which the football wasn't going well for me and I didn't want to study. I didn't like to train. I only liked playing the games and that way it was going to be very difficult for me to achieve something. I got really angry. I was a rebel and that worked against me."

His need to shout no to a reality that caused him pain and suffocated him was so great that he almost shouted no to his football career. He was in Nacional's seventh team. He and 25 others. The following year three or four wouldn't make the cut and Luis would be one of them. Daniel Enríquez, the co-ordinator of the youth teams, said it very clearly to Wilson Pírez, the delegate of Nacional, but Wilson replied: "Give him another chance."

It was not easy, but finally he agreed: it would be the last one. Wilson went to Luis, took him aside and said, very seriously: "It's the last chance you're getting. Try to take it. Don't let me down."

Luis looked at him in silence. "Luis, if you want to go far in football, you have to take this opportunity."

Finally, he had the chance to choose. And he thought: "I'm 14 years old and I can't know now if I'm going to be a professional footballer. But I have to try to go as far as possible. I have to try. I have to think about my family, my brothers, and that if I go far I'll be able to help them … I have to get on with it."

And, seeing that some team-mates turned up to training in boots the club had given them, he also thought: "If you want those boots you've got to train." It was the first target of his life. His first mission. He looked at it, observed it, weighed it up, and went for it, albeit with a tinge of uncertainty and incredulity.

And then he met Sofía, who would go on to become his girlfriend and later wife. She changed him for ever. Sofía was 12 and Luis was 15 when they met. "It was a big change in every sense," he says. "I was very lazy about studying and she helped me to realise that it wasn't because I was a dunce that things weren't going well but because I wasn't interested."

He stopped going out so much, started turning up regularly for school and leading a more orderly life. "I don't know why things weren't going well for me. But these are things that you think about now when you're a father and wonder: how are you going to explain to your child what you did at school or that you didn't want to study? You think about it and realise that you were making decisions as a rebellious adolescent that were bad."

Wilson had given him the possibility of choosing his future. He had given him freedom. And Sofía gave him the necessary confidence in himself to attain what he had decided upon. She had given him security. "I began to score goals," he says. "And I got to the point where I almost broke the Nacional youth record. The record was 64 goals in a full year (I think it belonged to Rubén Sosa) and I scored 63. Things like that gave you confidence."

Then came the next blow. Sofía told him she was moving to Spain. It was decided and there was no going back. He was afraid and he felt lost. They would see each other, would make the journey every few months (they would buy as much time as they could with the little money they had), they would communicate over the internet, by telephone … but it would not be the same. So there would be only one way to battle the inertia of events and the decisions of adults. And that was by training. Like never before. Luis was playing in the Nacional youth set-up and, if he made it as a professional footballer, later he would have the chance to go and play in Europe, and that way he would be closer. That's the way he had to do it. And he had to start as soon as possible.

Suárez ended up playing at Ajax to be near to his then girlfriend and now wife, Sofia, who had moved to Spain aged 16. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

"That was when I really realised that if I wanted to be close to her I'd have to work hard. I'd have to wake up. So I set to work much harder than I needed to. I wasn't free to go there nor her to come here because of the money situation. So I had to train to the max to be able to succeed in Europe."

Two years went by. Two years of training, matches, and of a few transatlantic trips snatched by luck, when he made his debut in Nacional's first team. "I'm one step away from what I want," Luis told himself. And all that stemmed from love. He began by wanting to be closer to Sofía. That's how it began and then he started to realise that it was true that he could do it and then he continued to set himself targets, one after another, and attaining them too.

That was always his way of playing. "If a move doesn't come off for me, I want to keep trying it, and trying it and trying it. I really, really, really want to score. And I guess in life it's the same for me. If I want something, I really, really want that something. And if I don't get it, I get mad."

All his desire to make it to Europe he put into his feet, and he began to kick with all his might, going for the goal. And so great was his will to score that he cried when he couldn't do it. Like when (he remembers to this day) over five matches he missed between 20 and 30 chances. "Luis, it's not so hard," he told himself. "Why are you missing so many goals?"

And it kept on happening when he made his first-team debut, aged 18. But then Martín Lasarte, the coach, saw how he was suffering and told him: "Luis, I've got faith in you. Keep calm and things will work out for you. Don't listen to people. Don't listen whatever they tell you."

The confidence came back. He relaxed. He believed. The management of Groningen had seen him in a game with Nacional and signed him. Finally he had achieved his objective; he left for Europe with Sofía and they went to live in Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands. He was 19 and she 16.

It was a small city of 190,000 inhabitants, cold, very cold, and with "very special" people, closed to foreigners. They were together again but so much change unsettled Luis and in his first few games things didn't go well. "It was a disaster. I was fat and everything." The leaders of the club began to wonder: "What player did we bring back? Did we make a mistake?"

And Luis began to ask himself the same question: "Did I make the right decision?" Perhaps because he had already achieved his objective and needed another, which still hadn't imposed itself. But then there was a match in September 2006 against Vitesse, who wore yellow and black shirts [the colours of Nacional's rivals Peñarol]. And that was a special motivation for him, a Nacional fan.

But he was even more surprised when, starting the following day, people began to recognise him in the street, congratulate him and ask for his autograph. In that unknown foreign land he managed to build his fortress. The club told him: "Well, he's started to show something of what we saw in him."

The coach put total faith in him from that moment on and he told himself: "Now I can show what I came for and what I'm worth. After that match is when it all began. I became a player with confidence. It gave me such confidence that I was surprised."

He has not looked back since. In 2007 he joined Ajax and, then, in January 2011 he signed for Liverpool. The rest, as they say, is history.

Ana Laura Lissardy is a Uruguayan-Italian journalist and author. This is an edited extract comes from Vamos Que Vamos, with the life stories of the members of the Uruguay national football team who reached the World Cup semi-finals in South Africa 2010. Her next book, with the profiles of 10 people who followed their dreams (including the Olympic gymnastics Nadia Comaneci) will be published in December